It has been a while since a large number of businesses on Instagram have been struggling to generate the level of engagement they have been looking for. The primary reason for this seems to be not having the necessary tools to find out how exactly how their content is performing as well as whether they are really being able to connect well with their target audience.

Apparently, Instagram realized this too, and hence recently came up with tools specifically designed to help businesses get more insight about their content’s performance as well as understand their target audience better.

Business Profiles

Business profiles is a feature that allows business to stand out as a business on Instagram. It also allows them to put contact details on their profile, as well as choose how they wish to be contacted. Their potential customers would have the option to contact them with just a tap of the contact button, and even get directions to the business’ location.

However, it’s important to note that this feature would only be available to businesses that already have a Facebook page. So if you have one, you can simply tap the settings button and you would see an option to switch to a business account.

While there isn’t much to discuss this feature, as it’s simply about switching to a business account from a general one, you may still want to see how it looks using your personal account. This may help you figure out whether you need to make certain changes or remove some information that’s not needed.

Insights

This is probably the most important tool that you would want as a business. The lack of enough information to better understand the followers and the performance of the content were probably the biggest hurdle for businesses to market their products and services better on Instagram.

However, with the new Insights feature, that’s a thing of the past. Insights give you a very detailed overview of who your followers exactly are, including information such as their gender, location, age and more. Similarly, you also get to know a lot more information about your content that was previously terribly challenging to get access to, if not impossible.

Metrics such as your top posts, the level of engagement with your followers, reach and impressions are now easily accessible from right within the app. This information would go a long way in helping you come up with a significantly more effective content marketing strategy focused on your followers and target audience.

Shralpin is a great example that has used this particular business feature to great success, growing their Instagram account at a much faster pace after getting to know what skateboarders (their target audience) like to see and learn about.

You can follow a similar approach, too, by trying to understand your target audience better. Simply keep a track of posts that consistently generate more engagement, and start giving your followers more of what they want based on that.

Similarly, some other types of posts may fail to connect much with your followers, which would be apparent from the low reach and impressions, as well as the poor overall engagement. So you can simply work on making them more appealing to your target audience, or simply replacing them with what’s working well for you.

Also, don’t forget that you can create laser-targeted marketing campaigns as you would have access to so much information about your followers, including the city they live in.

In fact, you can go as deep as finding out what time zone (based on your followers’ demographics) they live in and post at the most popular times when most of your followers are active on the site. This is sure to take the engagement with your followers to a whole new level.

Promote

This is another great feature that may turn out to be very useful for businesses with a good amount of advertising budget. Simply put, you will be able to turn your best-performing posts into ads, again all from within the app.

What this means is that you won’t have to go through much trial and error, which is so annoyingly, not to mention “expensively” common while running advertising campaigns. You can simply use what’s already working for you and hence improve your chances of generating a great ROI quite a bit.

You will also be allowed to add a button which you can use to encourage your target audience to take whatever action you want them to take.

In order to make the most out of this feature, you would ideally want to pick posts that have not only been generating a good amount of engagement but also very likely to get more sales. Purely informational posts, even though very engaging, may not help generate a very good ROI.

As far as targeting is concerned, you would have the option to select your target audience or let Instagram do it for you. Again, you may get the best results if you select pretty much the same type of audience that has been connecting well with the post you’re looking to promote.

Brandon Leibowitz, owner of SEO Optimizers, been involved with digital marketing since 2007 and am well versed in marketing techniques to help both small and large businesses grow exposure online.